1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to managing a large number and variety of resources in a business environment and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method which maintain the interrelationships between the resources and make inferences about such relationships.
2. Background Description
A business solution may encompass a large number and variety of resources that range from role players and information items to tasks and business artifacts. The appropriate behavior of the business solution often depends on a capability to maintain the interrelationships between the resources and to make inferences about such relationships. Consider the example of an integrated development environment (IDE). When a Java source file is updated, the IDE should automatically update many dependent files including the class file and the various archives (.jar, .war and .ear) that contain this class file. This requires that the IDE understand the dependencies among these files. Further, if the IDE supports contextual collaboration, it will present in an integrated collaboration window a collection of collaboration elements (team members, discussion threads, annotations, etc.) that is relevant to the developer's current task. Again, this implies the need for proper relationship management.
A relationship is meaningful only within a certain context or scope. Further, contexts can be nested and form a hierarchy. Relationships valid in one context should also hold in a nested context. Proper relationship management must enable specification of the context hierarchy and association of relationships with a particular context. Unfortunately, there is no standardized support for such relationship managements. As a result, business solutions have to manage resource relationships in their own ad hoc manner, incurring a lot of costs in developing, deploying and maintaining solutions.